The clouds in this part of the country are larger than what I understand to be life. In the mornings they appear white and billowing, stolen from the dreams of Dutch masters; in the evenings, gold linings, scattered rain. Only now does it occur to me there is something in this sessile existence I may have missed. That the unknowns are still unknown, and the person I am formed in the shape of them.

Winter hid her before. I came to outrun something, and did little more than wander the same seven blocks of suburban road. Marveling at the lack of difference in this world, living and dead equally obscured by a white plenitude. I sequestered myself in front of someone else’s television. I imagined a life where I would not be asked to leave. In the basement I found I could not sleep unless I lay by an open window, until I witnessed with my own eyes the spectacle of my breath in the night.

In the Rockies, I struggle to walk and talk at the same time. I am trying to describe to someone I love a work of Peruvian literature; how it echoes cinema, doing away entirely with the distinctions between fiction and reality. With the mountains so near, I struggle to hold my own attention. This is the world that God has laid out for us, replete with the scent of summer pines, and never mind that I don’t believe in God, that every summer now is only an echo of another that came before, that the bruise below my sternum is still visible in certain lights. On this day, I am not nearly as complicated as I had imagined. I want the same things everyone else wants—to be safe, to be loved, and to feel amidst the currents of a life the confluences of something called happiness. It nearly makes me laugh out loud, to realize how simple I am. Like snow on the granite slopes: mostly water, waiting to thaw.

In the evenings, I circle the nearby reservoir. Dragonflies in crystal bodices, swallows diving amidst the reeds. Life is so loud here that I feel, rather than hear, its symphony. I stop amidst the dirt. Pause my music and put down the book that echoes cinema. Sideways lightning; solitary fireworks; and such a stranger I am to both these things their thunder takes me by surprise. Sound chasing light, condemned to follow, always, a few seconds behind. I no longer know how to make a melodrama of the universe. I am thinking that this is reality. Its beauty, its need, unmistakable. In the pages of novels the lines get blurred, but out here—under this darkening, endless sky—I could never confuse it for anything else.

There are conversations I am not meant to hear. The city has put a measure on the ballot to fund public safety, the latest euphemism for the black, ovular cameras which adorn our utility poles and traffic lights. My friend reschedules on work to show up at the council meeting that night. She is one of those people who is not content to love a place through mere words. I wish I could make the world understand how much she matters. As it is, I struggle to make it legible even to her. 

I said once that no matter where in the world you go, life is the same: it’s good if you’re rich, shit if you’re poor. Ideology, like winter, has a flattening effect—the entire earth reduced to a single shade, a single struggle. Does that mean ideology is wrong? No, my mind responds automatically—just a thing to be wielded carefully. I know, now, that no matter where in the world I go, no matter which mountain rises in the distance, I will come back to a single thought: how my place on this earth is a debt I can never repay. I will have the urge to touch my mother’s face. What I remember of her face. I will have the desire to look into my father’s eyes. I will recall they were made amber by the currents of a drowning river. I will want to tell them, It was different for me. And I will feel a tenderness so deep it amounts to sorrow.